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Now, all this is wrong. It is a frightful
source of confusion to prowl about here and there in the sentence in a
self-blinded way that would seem pathetic to a Roman, looking at things
without the side-lights afforded to him by the order; and, further,
it is a frightful waste of time. Take a sentence such as often occurs,
e.g., the opening of the third oration against Catiline, delivered before
the people. Imagine, now, two scenes: on the one hand the Roman
Forum, on Dec. 3, 63 BC, with a mass of men and boys listening to Cicero
as he tells the story of the entangling of the conspirators remaining in
Rome; on the other, a modern schoolroom, say in the Syracuse High
School (though I hope I am about to slander Dr. Bacon), Dec. 3, 1886 AD.
In the former case Cicero has the floor, as we say; in the
latter case, Dr. Bacon's assistant, book in hand, his pupils before him.
Both audiences want to get at the same thing, — what Cicero has to say.
In the first scene, Cicero proceeds: —

When he has said that, every soul that has heard him knows precisely
what he means. Now change to the Syracuse High School. The
teacher says, "first find your subject." So we run on, scenting out
a subject: —

Well, we are through with the entire sentence, and there is no subject!
Of course, then, it is implied in the verb, and that is the 2d person pronoun,
in the plural. Next we find our verb. That is, as it happens,
the last word, videtis. Then we go back, do we, and find the
modifiers of the subject, and then the modifiers of the verb? No,
I say to all that. We have already,
if we have been rightly brought up, understood
everything in that sentence by the time we reach the last syllable of it,
without having thought meanwhile of a single English word; and we
are as ready in 1886 to go on immediately with the next sentence as we
should have been if we had been Romans in the Roman Forum on that day in
63 BC. Or, to put it another way, the boy who, reaching
that oration in the course of his preparation for college, cannot understand
that particular sentence, and a great many much more difficult sentences
in the oration, from reading it straight through once in the Latin, nay,
from merely hearing his teacher read it straight
through once in the Latin, has been wrongly trained, is wasting
time sadly, out of a human life all too short, and, so far from being on
the direct way to read Latin with speed and relish, and then to proceed
to do so, is on the direct way to drop it just as soon as the elective
system of his particular college will allow, and, if he cares for literature,
to go into some language in which it is not necessary, first to find the
subject, and then the predicate, and then the modifiers of the subject,
and then the modifiers of the predicate, and then to do the same thing
for the subordinate sentence, or, if there are several subordinate sentences,
to do the same thing for each one of them in the order of their importance,
and then to put these tattered bits together into a patchwork.

The Art of Reading Latin: How To Teach It. An address delivered before the associated academic principals of the State of New York, December 28, 1886. William Gardner Hale, professor of Latin in Cornell University. 1887. Ginn and Company. Boston.

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